The future of cancer treatment is speeding towards us. It is accelerating, pinpointing, treating, beating cancer – faster than ever before and now a revolutionary machine that scans and kills cancer at the same time will be coming to Manchester
The MR-Linac machine is to be installed at two centres in Surrey and Manchester could open up a new era in highly-personalised radiotherapy.
The machine combines magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning and tumour-busting radiation treatment in one hi-tech package.
Two of only seven of the machines in the world are being delivered to the UK, initially for use in clinical trials.Each device is understood to cost more than a £3 million CyberKnife, a cutting-edge form of radiotherapy that hits hard-to-reach tumours with high-dose targeted beams.
The MR LINAC’s inbuilt camera guides oncologists directly to the tumour while they administer radiotherapy on the very same machine, with millimetre accuracy. The real-time tracking enables targeting the tumour, not just the organ involved,and spare healthy tissue. Incredibly, this image-guided treatment also allows the treatment to adapt the beam ‘coordinates’ and ‘hit’ the tumour even if it moves during treatment.
With their healthy tissue spared, patients will hopefully no longer need to wait for four to six weeks for their non-cancerous cells to recover before their next treatment session. They will have less time to wait, less hospital visits – and, of course, less side effects, giving patients more time to get on with their lives
One of them will be commissioned at the Royal Marsden Hospital’s site in Sutton, Surrey, early next year while the other will be commissioned at ayet undisclosed Manchester location.
Professor Uwe Oelfke, from the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said a major problem for radiotherapy was that patients’ internal anatomy changed “from day to day or even from second to second”.
Professor Uwe Oelfke, from the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said a major problem for radiotherapy was that patients’ internal anatomy changed “from day to day or even from second to second”.
Being able to view highly-detailed MRI images of a radiotherapy target site would allow far more accurate treatment with less damage to healthy tissue and fewer side effects. It’s extremely important for the success of radiation therapies that we can see what we want to treat at the time of the treatment, not diagnostic images which are basically reflecting the anatomical state a few days or weeks before the treatment,” said Prof Oelfke.
“With MRI you can constantly monitor the patient while the patient is being treated and adapt the dose precisely to the individual patient. This will allow a truly new practice of personalised radiation therapy.”
The MR-Linac machine would also make real-time monitoring of a patient’s response to treatment possible, marking a “step change”, said Prof Oelfke.
An early trial at the Royal Marsden to demonstrate the machine’s safety and effectiveness involving about two dozen patients is now in the planning stage.
Patients with tumours affecting different parts of the body will be recruited, including brain, head and neck, lung, oesophageal, pancreatic, breast, prostate, cervix and rectal cancers. They will be among the first in the world to use the machine
